Positive and negative sides of stress. Stress in the context of university education

Translated from English, stress means “pressure”, “pressure”, “pressure”. And in a big city, we experience these sensations all the time: sometimes the crush in transport, sometimes deadlines for completing work, sometimes the unceremonious pressure of the client infuriates us... There are so many similar moments that you will experience stress from the sheer length of the list. So let’s try to find the positives in this state at least today.

When we experience stress, our internal resources are mobilized and we begin to act with greater self-organization. An example of this is students who, the night before a test, manage to prepare more questions than in the last three days.

You can use stress to your advantage if you view it as a challenge. When management gives you new challenges, look at them as a great opportunity to learn new things and demonstrate your abilities. If you put in the effort, the result will not be long in coming, and your reward will be a feeling of satisfaction from the work done.

In stressful circumstances, it is useful to look at yourself from the outside. When you're nervous about missing a report deadline, watch how your colleagues behave. Surely among them there are those who perceive the situation solely as a working situation and continue to work as usual. This means that this state of affairs is stressful only for you, because this is how you evaluate what is happening.

Even from the most unpleasant situation you can learn a lesson. If you fail at a business meeting, analyze your tactics and figure out what you should have done differently. Having worked through the negative experience in this way, you will have a plan of action for the future and, having gone through this “test” several times, you will no longer look at it as stress.

In many cases, it is within our power to reduce the level of stress we experience in our daily lives. For example, you can stop being nervous every morning because you are late for work if you train yourself to get up 20 minutes earlier.

Stress is a reason to remember your victories and raise your self-esteem. When you feel like nothing is working out, remember your greatest achievement. This could be a brilliant graduation from university, an appointment to a desired position, or first place in a dance competition. Recreate in your memory everything down to the smallest detail: what you were wearing, what the weather was like, what feelings you felt. Remember this picture and refer to it whenever you feel unsure of yourself.

Stress is also a reason to treat yourself a little less harshly. When you replace a colleague who is on vacation, your boss delegates some of his responsibilities to you, and your partners do not send signed documents for three days, it is difficult to remain calm. So maybe it's time to relax with a cup of coffee? You will still never be able to keep everything under control and reproach yourself for not coping with other people's responsibilities.

Vladimir Vinokur said that the best cure for stress is a smile. In some cases, it can really have a beneficial effect on your mood, but if you get tired of smiling, you should change something. For example:

• setting: go on vacation or just visit a friend;
• type of activity: do something else (you can’t translate the presentation anymore - make a few work calls);
• type of activity: after intense mental activity, the best thing to do is to go in for sports.

Obviously, it is impossible to completely avoid stress. Yes, this is probably not necessary. After all, if we have enough wisdom to treat our own failures with a sense of humor and self-confidence to be able to say “no” to people, everything is definitely in order in our worldview!

Marina Lysenko found excuses for stress

Anatoly Vasilievich Alekseev

Publishing text

"I am calm. How to protect yourself from stress": Phoenix; Rostov n/Don; 2004

ISBN 5-222-04709-1

annotation

Today it is common knowledge that the vast majority of diseases have a psychological component at their core. The inability to control your psycho-emotional state often leads to the most serious consequences. The book offers simple, but very effective and efficient methods for training the psyche and controlling emotions, to form a harmonious attitude towards the world around you and improve the quality of your life.

Anatoly Vasilievich Alekseev

I am calm. How to protect yourself from stress

Editor's Preface

The book offered to the reader is based on materials from lectures and trainings by the prominent Russian scientist and practical psychologist Anatoly Vasilyevich Alekseev.

The commercialization of almost all aspects of our lives, which has occurred over the past decade, has contributed to the emergence of a large number of publications devoted to issues of mental health and protection of the psyche from stress factors that are a product of modern civilization. And the fact that the overwhelming number of publications came from the pen of foreign authors and translated into Russian testifies to the importance attached to this problem in most Western countries.

But due to the same aforementioned commercialization, some outstanding discoveries of Russian scientists and practitioners, which have been used for many years in many countries around the world, turned out to be inaccessible to Russians due to certain reasons or circumstances.

These include the system developed by Anatoly Vasilyevich Alekseev over many years in the best scientific centers of the USSR and Russia. Over the course of several decades, studying the human brain and psyche, Anatoly Vasilyevich was able not only to pick up the keys to the reserves of the psyche, but also developed programs that allow any person to learn to independently manage their mental and emotional state with great efficiency. In terms of accessibility-effectiveness ratio, these programs have no analogues in world practice and are adopted by psychologists in many countries around the world.

Introduction

We live in very difficult times, when many evil forces are against us. The main ones are the ever-accelerating pace of life; increasing noise and electromagnetic impact; unfavorable radiation background; deterioration in food quality; a steadily increasing flow of all kinds of information that chronically overloads our brain; a decline in moral principles and, as a consequence, an increase in drug addiction and crime. Even seemingly impassive nature, after many years of mocking attitude towards it, began to respond to its offenders with various environmental hazards - such as the ozone hole, the greenhouse effect, poor purification of the water we drink and the air we breathe.

For all these reasons, the health of people around the world cannot be considered prosperous, and in a number of regions, unfortunately, it is clearly deteriorating. It is getting worse, despite enormous advances in the various human sciences, which (due to many social problems) are very difficult to implement in people's daily lives.

Let's take a short excursion into distant history. In Ancient Greece, among the many different gods that folk imagination created, as they say, for all occasions, there was also the god of healing - Asclepius. Therefore, in those days, doctors were called Asclepiads. The most brilliant doctor of the ancient world, Hippocrates, who lived several centuries BC, was from the famous family of the Asclepiads of Kos, that is, from the family of those ancient Greek doctors who created their own medical school, famous throughout the ancient world, on the island of Kos, in the Aegean Sea. Later, when the Romans conquered the Greeks, they renamed Asclepius in their own Latin way and called him Aesculapius. That is why even today doctors are often called aesculapians.

But long before the invasion of the Romans, the ancient Greeks clearly understood that Asclepius, although he was a god, alone could not cope with all the tasks of the then healthcare system. And folk wisdom gave him two daughters, two young goddesses, as assistants. One was called Panacea. Her name meant “all-healer.” The sick prayed to her, asking for recovery. The Romans renamed it in their own way as Panacea - that’s what we still call everything that, in our opinion, can help us, not only in treatment, but in any matter.

And the second daughter's name was Hygieia. People turned their prayers to her when they needed advice on how to maintain and improve their health. For example, before a wedding, a military campaign or on the eve of the Olympic Games. In memory of this nice girl, the area of ​​medicine that deals with the preservation and promotion of health in healthy people began to be called hygiene.

Thus, already in those very distant times from us, people well understood that in the struggle for health there are two main directions - therapeutic, helping the sick to regain health, and hygienic, the task of which is to maintain health in healthy people. Although elementary logic suggests that in all respects it is better to live without getting sick than to get treatment if you get sick, nevertheless, the overwhelming majority are still extremely frivolous, or even dismissive, about the recommendations of hygienists. And the result is obvious - humanity is affected by many different diseases that could simply not exist if the rules of hygiene were followed. And the environmental disasters that have befallen us especially in recent decades (the greenhouse effect, ozone holes, etc.) also come from neglecting these rules.

Hygiene, one might say, is the medicine of the future. A future where people won't get sick. Such a future, where a person who is ill with, say, a sore throat or dysentery, will be looked at not with regret, but with condemnation, as they look at a dirty person these days, who is himself to blame for walking dirty, although he has both hot water and soap and washcloth.

But in order to live to such a happy time, where there will be no place for many modern diseases, it is necessary now, without delay, to begin strict, daily observance of the rules of hygiene. In this science there are various departments, for example, such as military, industrial, age, social, etc. But in all these departments there are two main branches - physical hygiene - hygiene of the body, and mental hygiene - hygiene of the brain, called psychohygiene.

In general, we know about the rules of body hygiene and, to one degree or another, observe them in everyday life. For example, they wash their hands before eating and after using the toilet. An apple that has fallen to the ground is not wiped on the stomach, sleeve or trouser leg, but is freed from dirt under a stream of clean water, etc. But as for the rules of mental hygiene, here, as practice shows, knowledge is most often simply zero. Although our mental and physical health primarily depends on the state of the neuropsychic sphere. Why physical?

Today, throughout the civilized world, diseases of the cardiovascular system are in first place. And they die primarily from these diseases. Why from them? Do we really tire our heart and blood vessels so much with excessive physical exertion? Just the opposite! In this regard, we greatly underload our cardiovascular system, as we begin to move less, neglect physical education, and sit for a long time at the table and in front of the TV. And the heart, not receiving the necessary load that trains its muscles, begins to weaken. And he turns out to be defenseless against the very formidable danger of our days - before the burden of all kinds of mental experiences and shocks. After all, the cardiovascular system is very closely connected with the neuropsychic sphere, with the brain. Therefore, everything that “hits you on the head” always affects the condition of the heart and blood vessels. All these well-known hypertensive crises, angina attacks, heart attacks, strokes - all this is a consequence of mental experiences that primarily hurt the heart.

But not only the cardiovascular system suffers from mental stress. Peptic ulcers of the stomach and duodenum, bronchial asthma, diabetes, various skin lesions, including eczema, etc. can also develop. All these ailments are united under the general name - psychogenic diseases, that is, those caused by mental causes.

However, personal experiences are not the only reason for this. We live in very difficult times. Many evil forces have fallen upon us now. This is an accelerating pace of life with a wide variety of social upheavals, and increasing noise and electromagnetic influences, and an unfavorable radiation background, and a steadily increasing flow of all kinds of information that cannot be ignored, and it chronically overloads our brain, causing a state of overstrain in it. And when such an overvoltage reaches a critical point, it, like a lightning strike, is discharged into the body, disabling one or another of its systems - depending on your luck. Some are limited to mild shortness of breath, while others, for example, after a heart attack, even lose their lives. Unfortunately, as statistics show, the number of people affected by psychogenic diseases is growing from year to year in all economically developed and not very developed countries, with their very stressful lifestyle.

The famous question arises - what to do? How to protect yourself from the blows of life that lead to psychogenic diseases? Answering this question from its own perspective, medical science has created many different medications, the use of which reduces the degree of mental stress. These include the widely popular today seduxen, elenium, tazepam and many others, united under the general name “tranquilizers,” that is, giving a state of calm and serenity. It would seem that a way out was found - I found myself captive in a difficult, psychologically wounding situation, took a pill, then another, and the medicine helped, relieved the severity of my emotional experiences. This is actually what happens - tranquilizers undoubtedly help in most cases. But for the time being, for the time being. The fact is that if there is no objection to short-term medication use, then there can be no question of their systematic use. Because the body begins to gradually get used to the action of pharmacological agents and ceases to respond to them with the desired calm. And this requires increasing doses, which in turn often leads to poisoning and the emergence of a new, special - medicinal disease.

And the same question arises again - what to do? After all, life never ceases to confront us with various difficulties, troubles, and suffering. But it turns out that using sedatives all the time is impossible and even dangerous. My answer is that you need to master the rules of mental hygiene and strictly follow them every day. These rules will save and protect the neuropsychic sphere and the entire body from the consequences of those “blows to the head” that our lives are so generous with. But before getting acquainted with the rules of mental hygiene, a few words about what stress is.

PART 1. PROTECTING THE BRAIN

Chapter 1. Pros and cons of stress

A few words about stress. This word has become very common today, even fashionable in its own way. Every now and then you hear: “Don’t make me feel stressed!”, “Now I’ll make you so stressed that you won’t recognize your own people!” etc. It is easy to see that in such expressions stress is understood as something unwanted that can cause trouble. And those who say so do not know that the author of the theory of stress, the Canadian scientist Hans Selye (1907–1982), who published the first works on this topic back in the late 30s of the last century, at the last stage of his life revised his previous views in many respects. In 1974, he published the book Stress Without Distress. Already in the title, the old concept of “stress” is contrasted with the new one – “distress”. What is their difference? “Stress” is an English word that is widely used in everyday speech when talking about processes such as “tension, pressure, pressure.” And “distress” translated from English means “grief, unhappiness, exhaustion, malaise.” The difference, as is easy to see, is significant.

So, according to the final views of G. Selye, people should not and are not able to avoid stress, because many factors that cause stress (stressors) are the most important activators in the life of every person. Since stress accompanies almost any activity, only those who do nothing can avoid it. According to G. Selye, idleness itself is also stress, or rather distress. Here are a few excerpts from the named book by G. Selye: “Stress is the flavor and taste of life.” “Complete freedom from stress leads to death”. “Even to death?” – many may be surprised. Yes, precisely to death. After all, the body, without receiving stimulating stress influences, ceases to function properly and gradually begins to die.

Thus, we draw a fundamentally new conclusion: stress is good. But in cases where stress factors bring grief, unhappiness, and suffering, they become distressed. And distress as a harmful phenomenon must be combated. Better yet, prevent it from occurring as much as possible.

In contrast to distress, the Swedish scientist Lennard Levy proposed another term - “eustress” (the Greek prefix “ev” means “good, favorable”).

So, at present everything is put in its place: any effect on the body is stress: if it causes harm, it is called distress, and if it brings clear benefits - eustress .

The question naturally arises: how to protect yourself from various distressing influences, from everything that is harmful to health? Of course, a lot depends on the spiritual and material improvement of the life of society, on its attitude towards nature; in many cases, various medications and other means from the medical arsenal can help. But still, the greatest opportunities for self-defense lie within the person himself - only many do not know about it. They don’t know that nature has endowed our body with powerful mechanisms self-regulation. The ability to use the capabilities of these mechanisms is a great force in the fight against distressing factors, and this skill should be adopted by everyone. In other words, everyone who does not want to become a victim of various negative circumstances generated by our difficult and stressful life and, in spite of everything, strives to maintain and strengthen their health, simply must learn to manage themselves, their mental and physical state.

Despite popular belief, stress can be not only harmful, but also beneficial - the nature of its influence on a person depends on many factors, among which the three most important can be identified: the intensity of stress, its duration and the susceptibility of a particular person to a given stressor. Let's look at these three factors in more detail.

Stress intensity.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American psychologists R. Yerkes and J. Dodson established that the nature of a person’s performance depends in a certain way on the level of his emotional activity. It turned out that a person develops maximum productivity with an average level of emotional arousal, while both an excess of emotions and a lack of them lead to a decrease in work efficiency.

Dependence of labor productivity on the level of stress

The same is true with stress. Each job requires its own certain level of stress: for mental work it is less, and for physical work it is more. For example, for an accountant preparing a quarterly report, it is desirable to experience a minimum level of stress, while for a politician speaking in front of voters, on the contrary, a certain dose of excitement and excitement is desirable, which will help him “ignite” the public. For a programmer who is developing a new computer program, it is desirable to be calm, but for an Olympic athlete who is about to break a world record, maximum stress is necessary, otherwise he will not be able to give his all to win. Therefore, when faced with stress, do not rush to fight it - it is possible that it helps you mobilize all your strength to achieve your goal.

Duration of stress.

Science has established that the greatest danger, the greatest danger, is caused not by strong and short stress, but by long-term, although not so strong, stress. Short-term strong stress activates a person, as if “shaking” him, after which all body indicators return to normal, and weak but long-term stress causes depletion of defenses, and primarily of his immune system.

Nowadays, scientists have little doubt that daily minor conflicts and everyday hassles (associated with an angry boss, naughty children, a noisy neighbor, a long line to the doctor, or reproaches from a spouse) have a much more detrimental effect on health than severe, but one-time stress caused by a much more significant reason. This paradox, like many other “oddities of human nature,” goes back to the distant past, when nature prepared our ancestors to powerfully but briefly repel dangers, but could not predict the stresses associated with an unsuccessful career or waiting in traffic jams. Our genetic "Fight-or-Flight" program is designed for a few minutes, maximum - hours of intense activity, but even with mild stress, anti-stress hormones are not enough for weeks or months of worry.

According to the founder of the doctrine of stress, Hans Selye, each person has a certain reserve of adaptive energy, and if he has used it up, the third phase of stress inevitably begins - the “exhaustion phase.” Therefore, the main conclusion from this information is: do not bring your stress to a chronic stage, try to solve problems as quickly as possible, even with maximum effort. The main thing is to immediately organize yourself a proper rest and restore the body’s defenses.

Individual sensitivity to stress.

Each person has his own “threshold of sensitivity to stress” - that level of tension at which the effectiveness of activity increases (eustress occurs), as well as a “critical threshold of exhaustion” when the effectiveness of activity decreases (distress occurs). Determining these points is extremely important in order to live and work, on the one hand, effectively, and on the other, not to the detriment of one’s health. To understand where these lines lie between useful and harmful tension, you must listen to your feelings, trusting your body and your intuition as much as possible. At the same time, do not be afraid to experiment with loads. At some point, you will discover at what level of stress your fighting spirit appears and luck comes into your hands (people have long called this state “luck”), and under what loads and at what duration of stress fatigue appears, strength does not have time to recover , and in my soul doubt arises about the need for further struggle. Then it makes sense to stop and analyze the situation. It is possible that you have simply lost your way - and are pursuing a false goal that only takes you away from the right direction.

The effect of stress on the human body is considered quite harmful. But it was not always so. This reaction of the body has ancient roots - in the Stone Age, our ancestors, who hunted wild animals, sometimes managed to save their lives due to stress.

Stress and food

The habit of eating stress with all sorts of goodies, fast food, adds problems to an overloaded body and depletes the last reserves of energy. In this case, appetite disturbance occurs, body weight becomes less or, on the contrary, increases; a person may feel constantly tired; mood changes; Itchy skin rashes may appear. If this destructive process is not stopped, the quality of life will steadily deteriorate until it becomes a nightmare.

How to behave

If you can't change your environment, you should change your diet. Avoid refined foods and carbonated drinks and include in your diet foods that will help fight stress.

You know that too much stress is bad for your health, but it turns out... too little stress, also not very good. Learn how to maintain pressure levels without boiling.

There are three things that are inevitable in life: death, taxes and stress. And the only good thing can be stress.

Because chronic stress that never seems to let up can lead to heart disease, obesity, breast cancer, but it turns out... in small doses stress is even beneficial.

Short-term stress triggers the body's defense response and increases the activity of immune cells, which, in turn, help the body fight various ailments. Think of stress as your body’s “repair team.”

The appearance of stress quickly mobilizes this “team” and directs forces to the damaged areas where they are most needed.

A little shake-up is always good

As a result, your brain and body get a jolt. A quick wave of stress can prevent illness: Research shows that stress strengthens the immune system, and acts as an inoculation that forces the body to function more efficiently and be resilient to subsequent potential shocks.

Small amounts of stress hormones can also sharpen your memory. A 2009 study at the University at Buffalo showed that rats that were forced to swim (thus putting them in a state of stress) remembered their way through a maze better than rats that were not exposed to such stress.

There needs to be a balance in this matter.

Too little stress turns things into boredom and demotivates you. Too high a level of stress not only weakens the nervous system, but can also serve as a source of various diseases. It is important to pay attention to your “stress thermometer” and stay below the boiling point.

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